Ramrod Blu-ray Review
The Farmer and the Cowhand should be friends.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, November 19, 2012
Paramount was home to two of the most iconic blondes in motion picture history, both of whom suffered from mental
instability and post-Hollywood careers that were fraught with traumas and turbulence.
Frances Farmer was signed by Paramount on
her 22nd birthday in September 1935 and by the end of 1936 was arguably Paramount's hottest property, albeit mostly
due to her loan out to Goldwyn for
Come and Get It. A mere five years later she was being offered only
B-movies and supporting roles at her home studio while managing to eke out a few higher profile parts at other
studios,
but by the end of 1942, she had been dropped by Paramount and had been arrested for drunk driving, an arrest which
would ultimately lead to her headline making court appearance in 1943 and her eventual institutionalizations which
would fill out the bulk of the remainder of that decade. Veronica Lake, by contrast, came to Paramount in 1941, just
when Farmer's career was on the ropes, after having had a less than stellar tour at RKO. Lake made an immediate
impression at Paramount, though in one of those unintentional ironies that seems to haunt Hollywood with some
regularity, the role that really put her on the map, that of the girl in
Sullivan's Travels, was at one point thought
of as a perfect vehicle for Frances Farmer, the actress whom Preston Sturges evidently preferred for the film, but who
was scuttled by the studio which was finding Farmer increasingly unreliable and unstable. (Many of us who have been
fascinated by Farmer's life story through the years have wondered what might have happened had Farmer indeed
made
Sullivan's Travels, which would have reunited her with her
Come and Get It co-star Joel McCrea
and been a
high profile project with a strong writer-director that might have resuscitated her career and kept her on track
emotionally.) Lake churned out a rather impressive quantity of films at Paramount during her seven year ordeal, but,
as in the case of Farmer, excessive drinking led to her being shunned by her fellow actors and Lake was also dropped
by the studio at the end of her first tour of duty.
Unlike Farmer, however, Lake was able to keep working, at
least for a while, something fostered by her then husband, André de Toth. De Toth never really captured the brass ring
in Hollywood, instead trafficking in B-movies or cult appeal items (like the 3D
House of Wax).
Ramrod is
a fitfully entertaining 1947 western reuniting
Lake with Joel McCrea, but it's a film that never really finds a
convincing or comfortable melding
of Lake's very contemporary sultriness with a nineteenth century western setting.
One of the major issues that led to Farmer's emotional turmoil was the fact that she absolutely hated being a
glamorous
film star, and in fact seemed to resent how incredibly beautiful she was and how that limited the way Hollywood saw
her.
Lake on the other hand had no ambitions to storm the legitimate theater world the way Farmer did, and Lake seemed
happy enough to utilize her physical charms to advance her career (though she was on record as saying that she, like
Farmer, abhorred cheesecake and only used her hair to intimate her smoldering sexuality). Lake had no real issues
being
labeled "the peek-a-boo girl" (by contrast, when Farmer returned to Paramount after her triumph in Clifford Odets'
Golden Boy, the press hype surrounding her pretty turgid 1938 film
Ride a Crooked Mile highlighted her
braided hairstyle which the studio donned "The Golden Girl", something that Farmer dismissed with a typical sneer). It's
interesting to see De Toth play on Lake's image, however subtly, in some scenes in
Ramrod where he shoots
his
wife from an angle which
suggests the iconic peek-a-boo style without ever actually recreating it, something that
might—as quite a bit of this film does—seem out of place with its cowhand milieu.
Lake never really had the acting
gravitas that Farmer did, at least in her own mind (as mentioned by some of
her collaborators at the time), but
Ramrod proves that she was much more than just a pretty face. While some
of her performance here seems kind of lackluster and even somnambulistic, one fantastic scene early in the film when
she loses it with her father (Charlie Ruggles, who ironically played Farmer's father in 1937's
Exclusive) reveals a
tempestuousness that she rarely disclosed on screen. It's a visceral moment and certainly a very unusual one in the
annals of Lake's sex goddess screen persona. It's also rather interesting that de Toth casts his then wife in a less than
completely sympathetic role as Connie, and in fact Connie (probably not so coincidentally Lake's real life first name) is a
rather shaded character, one as devious in her own way as her scheming father is.
The basic plot of
Ramrod finds Connie being given a large spread of land by her erstwhile fiancé, a kind of
namby pamby guy who lets Connie's father and town bigwig Frank Ivey (Preson Foster) walk all over him and throw him
out on his ear. Connie's Dad has made no secret about wanting Connie to settle down with Ivey, but Connie has other
plans, and that includes putting Ivey and her father in their respective places. To do that she hires foreman Dave Nash
(Joel McCrea), who has his own reasons for hating Ivey. Nash hires some buddies to help out (including future
Hazel Dad Don DeFore), but Connie's machinations lead to unexpected tragedy. Meanwhile Dave is attempting
to drown his sorrows in dissolute drinking over having lost both a wife and a son, which a lovely young townswoman
named Rose (Arleen Whelan) is attempting to snap him out of. It's one of
Ramrod's most interesting facets that
it refuses to pair McCrea and Lake as a romantic duo, despite the film's emphasis on Connie obviously having romantic
designs on Dave.
Ramrod turns out to be a study in several wounded souls attempting to get to their own self defined safe place.
Connie wants an independent life away from the imperious influence of her father, and Dave wants to escape the
harrowing memories of a former, happier life. The film is rather a dark outing, perhaps why it's sometimes thought of
as another Western—
noir hybrid like another recent Olive release,
Pursued, also from 1947.
Pursued eschewed one of the
standard tropes of
noir, namely the alluring and destructive
femme fatale, in favor of an emotionally
roiled hero.
Ramrod still posits a similar kind of troubled male lead, but in one of the most fascinating twists in
this particular film, the seductive power of the
femme fatale actually leads to
her own downfall rather
than the
hero's.
